Attorney General Cooper awarded highest honor by fellow AGs

Cooper presented with the 2013 Kelly-Wyman Award for national leadership

Boston: Attorneys General from across the country honored North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper with the group’s top award last night in Boston.

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, president of the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG), presented Cooper with the 2013 Kelley-Wyman Award, the Association’s highest honor. The award is given each year to the Attorney General who has done the most to achieve the objectives of NAAG.

“Roy has steadfastly championed the interests not only of North Carolinians, but also of Americans across the country,” Gansler said in presenting the award. “His dedication, judgment, and hands-on approach to the office have made the attorneys general with whom he has worked, as well as NAAG as an association, better in numerous and important ways.”

Cooper’s nomination cited his work to fight predatory lending on both the state and national levels, tackle social media privacy and safety threats, and improve cooperation on multi-state cases and joint investigations between states and the federal government.

In nominating him for the award, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller particularly singled out Cooper’s work on the landmark national settlement he helped reach in 2012 to reform mortgages and prevent foreclosure abuses.

“With a prominent background as a legislator on mortgage lending and his long-time work as Attorney General in substantial residential lending cases, Roy brought both his energy and his experience to bear upon the unprecedented cooperative effort by the states and the federal government to address that housing crisis and the lending problems that created it,” Miller wrote in his nomination. “Roy personally spent countless hours on the telephone, travelling to meetings and around the country, and steadily helping shape a process that itself created a new and effective model of government working across state and federal, as well as party, boundaries to find the best result possible.”

Cooper has served as North Carolina Attorney General for 12 years. He served as NAAG president in 2010-2011 and currently serves as a member of the Association’s Executive Committee and Consumer Protection Working Group, co-chair of its Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Working Group, and ex-officio board member of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Cooper continues to work with attorneys general across the country on multi-state investigations to stop scam artists and recover funds for consumers. He is currently working with other AGs and the U.S. Department of Justice to litigate claims against S & P ratings companies for contributing to the nation’s financial crisis through inflated ratings of risky securities.